SAN FRANCISCO -- Opening ceremonies for the 34th America's Cup don't start until the Fourth of July, but the fireworks have already begun.

Lighting the fuse is Grant Dalton, the wiry and combustible 55-year-old head of Emirates Team New Zealand, who has accused his Swedish rival, Artemis Racing, of messing up the racing schedule and using its tragic capsize for competitive gain. They can "get away with it," Dalton said in an interview this month with the New Zealand Herald, because so few teams are competing.

Dalton's taunts, and the swift and scathing response from Artemis CEO Paul Cayard, made one thing perfectly clear: This gentlemen's sport is far from gentlemanly.

From right, Emirates Team New Zealand Managing Director Grant Dalton and team member David Thomson prepare to train for the America's Cup in the San Francisco Bay, Calif. on Friday, May 24, 2013. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group)
(
LiPo Ching
)

The passion promised at sea this summer is getting a head start on land. Unlike in just about every other sport, except maybe boxing, pregame bluster in sailing isn't only common, it's cultural.

In the interview with his hometown paper, Dalton -- who already mocked Larry Ellison at a fancy fundraiser in Auckland last month -- unfurled a string of attacks against Artemis. The Swedish team announced it will likely miss the first month of round-robin racing in the Louis Vuitton Cup that starts July 7 and sail into the semifinals in third place in August, hoping to beat New Zealand and Italy's Luna Rossa to take on defender Oracle Team USA in the America's Cup finals in September.

Advertisement

"The whole thing is now geared to the needs of the weakest common denominator," said Dalton, whose team has set up at Pier 32 along the Embarcadero. "I wonder what would happen if the Rugby World Cup had to stop and reorganize itself in an unsatisfactory way because Namibia had a few injuries. How would that go down?"

Artemis CEO Cayard, a San Francisco native, has said little since his boat wrecked and one of his crewmen died in the May 9 capsize. But he immediately fired off a news release from the team's base in Alameda: Dalton's "public insults are out of line and unsportsmanlike," the statement said, adding that Dalton's "derogatory analogies should be left on the dock."

The feud is now before an international jury of sailing experts, two of whom will fly in from New Zealand and Malaysia to meet with all four teams on Wednesday to discuss new rules imposed after the capsize that effectively allow Artemis to skip the first month of sailing without the regatta's $100,000-per-day penalty.

The America's Cup Event Authority running the world-renowned regatta is trying to stay out of the fray, already overwhelmed with damage control since it put out a new schedule showing only five real races in July instead of what was originally intended to be 21. Organizers just announced refunds to thousands of spectators with tickets for bleacher seats in July.

But Tom Ehman, the vice commodore of the Golden Gate Yacht Club that is home to Oracle Racing USA and sponsoring the international regatta, had no trouble standing up against Dalton's "diatribe." On his Facebook page, Ehman posted a copy of the proper protocol of the America's Cup that forbids "public statements that unreasonably attack or disparage" the regatta or another competitor.

"It continues to irk a lot of people" that Emirates Team New Zealand "continues to bag Artemis for not being ready to race as soon as ETNZ thinks they should be," Ehman wrote in another post. "That Artemis is making a courageous and almost superhuman effort to stay in the game at all is something that most everyone else in the AC community is celebrating, and properly so."

And so goes the posturing, gamesmanship and rivalries of the America's Cup, loaded with 162 years of history, characters and character assassinations.

In 1895, Lord Dunraven was stripped of his honorary membership in the New York Yacht Club after accusing its team of cheating by moving ballast into its hull in the middle of the night. In 1986, Dennis Conner, known as "Mr. America's Cup" after winning the cup four times and losing it twice, famously accused New Zealand of cheating when it built its 12-meter boat out of fiberglass instead of aluminum like the rest of the competitors.

In 2010, Ellison accused Swiss billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli of stacking the deck against him by imposing rules designed to give the Swiss team a clear advantage. While that regatta is long over -- and Ellison emerged victorious -- the rivalry still bares its fangs on screen today. In "The Wind Gods," a new documentary produced by Ellison's son, David, and narrated in the imperious tones of Jeremy Irons, Bertarelli is portrayed as an entitled, born-into-wealth billionaire ruthlessly trying to fend off the fair-minded, self-made, bootstrapping Ellison.

So much for the protocol.

"There are personal animosities. There are people who really don't like each other," said Jack Griffin, an America's Cup expert who lives in Switzerland and founded the "Cupexperience" website and newsletter. "There's real nasty gamesmanship that went on and we're seeing some of it now."

As the 34th America's Cup rapidly approaches, Dalton -- who declined an interview request for this story -- has emerged as the No. 1 provocateur. This is a man who once threatened to run naked through the streets of Auckland with a pineapple stuck up his backside if the all-women's team beat him on any leg of the Volvo Ocean Race in the early 2000s. And this is the same man who got a local crowd chuckling last month when he showed a video at a fundraiser of Ellison boasting that 16 teams would be challenging him for the 2013 America's Cup, instead of the three that actually entered.

"Mate," Dalton said to Oracle Racing CEO and fellow Kiwi Russell Coutts, who was simmering next to him on the dais, "what the hell went wrong?"

Last week's dust-up is classic Dalton, said Kimball Livingston, editor-at-large for Sail Magazine. "Part of it is playing to the home audience. Part of it is keeping the needle in. This is a psychological game as much as anything else."

Still, Dalton, like Cayard, "would be a good man to have at your side in the middle of a storm with everything going wrong. Just his basic competency," Livingston said, "and his ability to chew on nails."